MOU Sen's Work Someone to Talk to

1523435489

Venue: National Centre for the Performing Arts - Theatre

Dates: April 20-22, 2018

About

Someone To Talk To is a full-length novel by LIU Zhenyun, published in 2009, awarded many prizes including the 8th Mao Dun Literary Prize, translated into over 20 languages, and hailed as the “Chinese One Hundred Years of Solitude.” Literary critic ZHANG Qinghua wrote, “Someone To Talk To is an elegy of subsistence, a drama of destiny, a dismal folk aria, a book of ‘virtuosity’ with a subject quite the same as narration, and a novel full of the sadness of life and real absurdity of subsistence.”

The theatrical version of Someone To Talk To, adapted and directed by MOU Sen, with CAO Qing’e’s ill-fated life as the main line, tells how three generations of people in the Central Plains save themselves in an attempt to reveal how Chinese people lead a spiritual life.

CAO Qing’e, born in Yanjin, Henan, got critically ill at the age of 78. Lay dying, she thought about her life.

When she was three years old, her father died an unnatural death in Qinyuan, Shanxi. When she was five, her stepfather YANG Moxi married into their family, renamed WU Moxi. After her mother carried on a clandestine love affair with another man and ran away from home, WU Moxi took her away from Yanjin to search for her mother. She was abducted halfway and then taken to some places before ending up in Qinyuan, Shanxi.

Seventy years later, CAO Qing’e’s son NIU Aiguo went out of Qinyuan to search for his wife, who had run away from home on account of a clandestine love affair. When his mother was dying, NIU Aiguo learned that she had returned to Yanjin and searched for the past, but failed. To fulfill her last wish, NIU Aiguo returned to Yanjin and arrived in Xianyang, Shaanxi, where he got to know how WU Moxi spent his last years after CAO Qing’e was lost.

They spend seventy years searching across the Central Plains for the sake of one word and one person, as if they were fated to do so, and all had been decreed by fate in their previous life...